You Let Me In - Camilla Bruce Page 0,67
does. And now you are stuck with a dead man in your garden. What are you going to do about that?”
“Fill in the pit, I think. Fill it in and plant some bulbs. It’ll be a nice tulip patch in the spring.”
“Easy as that, huh?”
“What else am I to do? Call the police? Call Mother?”
“What does Mara say?”
“Nothing. She hasn’t been back since she left for the woods.”
“She might be, though, brother, and if she does come back, please don’t let her in.”
“Why not?” Again that shiver in his voice. Maybe on some level, he too knew that after the night they’d just shared, Mara wasn’t safe company for him. “You ought to be pleased, though,” he said at last, when the silence between us stretched, “even if just a little…”
“Why?”
“The bear is gone, her pain has ended.”
“If you really think that, you’re a fool. Pain like that doesn’t go away, and she is the fool for thinking that it would. The rush from the kill will end, and what then? She still has a very long life to live.”
“I won’t be sorry that I helped her, though.” He sounded like a child.
“Not yet,” I warned him. “You’re not sorry yet. Doesn’t mean you won’t be.”
“Doesn’t mean I will.”
“As you wish.” I gave up. “I’m sure you feel like quite the knight, but hurry up, now, your night isn’t over. You still have a hole to fill in.”
“Yes, yes, it really wouldn’t do if Mother came over and saw him down there.” Again, there was that shiver.
“No, my dear brother, it certainly wouldn’t.”
“I didn’t expect there to be so much blood, and those sounds that he made—”
“Go, go, go—fill in that hole!”
“Yes, Cassie, you’re right, I should go. I should go fill it in. I’ll do that now.”
“Good Ferdinand, you do that now.”
And that was the last time we spoke.
* * *
He never did fill in that hole, though, did he? Something happened between the time we hung up and the time he was found that prevented him from going outside to finish the job.
Could it have worked?
Maybe.
Maybe filling it in and planting tulips was just the right choice.
Maybe Mother would have thought that Father had left her, ignoring the fact that his valet and jacket were still there, the car in the garage, and—
No, it wouldn’t have worked.
From the moment he chose to wear Mara’s colors, Ferdinand was lost. There was no coming back from what he did—no coming back from what he’d witnessed. It’s hard, being the knight of a harsh queen.
As it was, however, it didn’t take Mother long to find her husband in her son’s garden. According to the police and the newspapers, Mother woke up, found him gone, brewed some coffee, and threw on a shawl over her morning robe. Then she grabbed two cups and walked over to Ferdinand’s to ask him if he had seen his father. At that time, I think, she still thought Father was out hunting pigeons, having seen the rifle missing from its rack. She took the shortcut through the gardens, not being properly dressed and all, planning to slip inside through the back door and wake her son with some fresh morning brew … On her way there, her sharp eyes caught sight of something unusual: a pile of dirt that shouldn’t be there; a freshly dug hole on the lawn. Wondering what that nonsense was about—the garden, she thought, was perfectly fine—she wandered over, balancing the cups, and looked down at that grisly scenario. Her husband was very much found, punctured and maimed by wooden spikes, and if he’d ever had a heart, it certainly wasn’t there anymore.
Mother screamed, dropped the coffee, and ran to Ferdinand’s patio doors, drumming with her fists on the glass, calling to Ferdinand to let her in. She had “just found your father dead in the garden!” She didn’t call it murder yet, mind you, didn’t suspect even that her son was involved, though her husband was dead on his lawn. She did realize that he was dead, so there was never any question of medics or an ambulance. I guess that was due to the hole in his chest. You can’t get much deader than that.
When Ferdinand failed to respond, she didn’t go in through the back door as she had planned, she went back to her own house and called the police. I don’t know what she said to them, only that it was logged as an accident at first.